The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 39

I like Russian trains.

Not for comfort, of which there is none, nor speed, of which there is barely any to be spoken about, particularly when you relate it to the size of the country that must be crossed. Not even, particularly, for the view, which is inevitably repetitive, as Mother Nature decrees that her works of wonder can only occur so frequently across such a vast and cultivated space.

I like Russian trains, or at least those I travelled on in the early spring of 1956, so many centuries after I gunned Lisle down in cold blood; I like the trains for the sense of unity that all these hardships create in its passengers. I suspect the experience is relative. Take a long, cold, uncomfortable, tedious journey in a carriage with just one difficult, dangerous or mad individual, and it seems plausible that the entire carriage will be dull and silent, for its own protection as much as anything else. But take that same journey in the company of cheerful companions, and you can find the time passes far more quickly.

My companions as I headed north-east from Leningrad under the cover of my new papers were nothing if not cheerful.

“Where I come from is shit,” explained Petyr, a seventeen-year-old boy desperately excited by the prospect of working eleven hours a day in a foundry. “All the people are shit, all the land is shit, and shit doesn’t even make the land less shit. But where I’m going–there I’m going to be something, I’m going to do something, and I’m going to meet a girl who wants to be with me and we’re going to have babies, and our children, they’re not going to have to know the shit that I have.”

“Petyr is very keen,” explained Viktoria, a quieter nineteen-year-old looking forward to studying agricultural policy. “My parents will be so proud. My mother, she can’t even read or write!”

The rattle of a small wooden box announced the advent of Tanya’s domino set, and as we huddled away from the mist-stained little windows and deeper into the moist interior of each other and the carriage, counters were laid and hopes dashed with the strategic planning and emotional commitment of Napoleon concocting a long campaign. I have no illusions about my companions–their enthusiasm was naïve, their hopes rash and their ignorance as to the outside world bordered on the intimidating. I could picture Viktoria fifty years from now, lamenting the loss of those Good Old Communist days, much as Olga now lamented the departure of the tsar; and Petyr, when tested, slammed his fist against his thigh and proclaimed, “We didn’t win the war because of all those bastards who disagreed with Stalin!” Is there innocence in ignorance? And if there is, do we tolerate others for their innocence’s sake? Sitting inside that train as the steam of our breath crawled up the walls and the carriage jumped over every join in the track like a young gazelle, I found I had no satisfactory answer to this question.

After seven hours of dominoes, even my companions were silent, dozing upright against each other’s shoulders and necks. I sat squashed between a shoemaker and a soldier returning home and considered my next step. I was looking for Pietrok-112, and it seemed likely that whoever was trying to prevent me from finding it would be able to predict my movements. Given this, entering undetected could well prove a problem, even with new papers, and the sensible course of action would be to retreat and try another day.

Therein lay the concern: which other day would I try, and what if the trail I was following had run dry by the time I returned? How long did I dare leave this matter resting, and was I prepared to let it go? I was a hunted fugitive, a stranger in a strange land, and I had been neither for more than a hundred years. The discomfort of my predicament was apparent in my grumbling stomach and the ache in my perpetually turning neck, but I had papers, a gun and money, and the exhilaration of my situation had sent adrenaline pumping through my veins like never before. I resolved to press on, knowing that the rational justification for this act was flimsy, and choosing not to care.

There were guards waiting at the end of the line. Local boys who’d received a telephone call, average age twenty-three, average rank private. It seemed likely they had a description but no picture. I lifted a near-empty bottle of vodka from the open bag of one of my travelling companions, swilled some round my mouth, rubbed more into my neck and hands like a perfume, rubbed my eyes until they watered, and joined the queue coming off the train. The sun was setting already, an angry small ball of light on the grey horizon, dull enough to stare at. The platform was slathered in thin black mud, snow-crusted in the shade, sodden in the dwindling light.

“Name!”

“Mikhail Kamin,” I slurred, huffing heavy breath into their faces. “Is my cousin here yet?”

The guard examined my papers–perfect–and my face–less so. “Remove your hat!”

I removed my hat. It’s easy to overplay alcoholic stupor; my personal preference is to merely highlight those characteristics which you might be manifesting anyway, in this case subservience. I twisted the ear flaps of my hat between my fingers, chewed my bottom lip and peered up at the guard from beneath the furrow of my eyebrows, neck curled in and shoulders hunched like a wading bird.

“What is the purpose of your journey?”

“My cousin,” I mumbled. “Bastard’s dying.”

“Who is your cousin?”

“Nikolai. He’s got this really big house. You should do something about him because he’s always had this really big house and I asked if I could stay some time but he said no.”

I treated the guard to another fragrant blast of breath and saw him flinch. He passed back the papers, nose crinkling in disgust. “Get away,” he grunted. “Sober up!”

“Thank you, comrade, thank you,” I intoned, bowing my way from his presence like a mandarin from a Manchu emperor. I slipped and stumbled my way out into the muddy street, splattering black stains of slime up my trousers as I went.

The town, if we could call it that, went by the name of Ploskye Prydy, and as I walked down its one still street I half expected to find that the fronts of the wooden shacks sinking slowly into the mud were exactly that–fronts with no backing, a Soviet answer to the cowboy movies, from one of which, any second now, a wildly screaming Cossack would come bursting, pursued by an angry peasant maid with a cry of “God damn you! God damn you to hell!” No such adventure struck. It seemed little more than a place where the railway stopped, a transit town built to service the journeys of people heading to other destinations. The roads were defined merely by the place where the mud was most pressed down; the one store had a sign in the porch which declared, NO EGGS, and the old veteran on his crutches in the door, an obligatory feature of all good cowboy movies, droned the same two lines of the same forgotten song like a tape stuck in a loop. Nevertheless, in its own small way Ploskye Prydy stood as the gateway between civilisation and the land beyond, a ploughed expanse of black mud and drooping trees as far as the eye could see. The only structure of any note was a large brick building on the side of the tracks, where the air simmered and the chimneys choked blackness into the sky: a brick maker’s kiln, providing material for the newer developments further north with translated names as glamorous as Institute-75 or Commune-32, a place for all the family. I bribed my way on to the back of the brick maker’s truck, heading north, towards Pietrok-111, and spent three black but warm hours sitting between still-cooling bricks, which slid and rattled uncontrollably from side to side as we bounced along the one arrow-straight road to the north. Once the worst of the brick falls had happened, and I was relatively secure in a den of tumbled building blocks, it was almost possible to doze, cocooned in the warmth of the cooling slabs, until with a shudder the truck came to a stop and the back was pulled down with a cheery cry of “Pietrok-111. Hope you enjoyed the ride!”

I climbed out blearily from the back as the brick maker and his assistant began throwing the bricks into a mish-mashed pile on the side of the road, like a newspaper boy hurling his daily delivery at the door of a rude neighbour, chatting away brightly as they did so. I blinked against the dim lights of the town, making out apartment blocks, one general store and, towering over it all, a refinery whose flares of burning gas were the only signs of colour in the dead-black night. The stars overhead were tiny numerous waters, frozen in a cloudless sky. I found Polaris, turning my face further north, and asked of my companions, “How far is it to Pietrok-112?”

They laughed. “Another two hours’ drive, but you don’t want to go there! It’s all soldiers and scientists there, comrade.”

I thanked them profusely and headed into what I suppose we should call the vibrant throbbing heart of the town.

It seemed unwise to seek out lodging. There was no reason to believe that the authorities weren’t yet pursuing me. The night was too cold to sleep outside, those pools of water which had by day melted in the darkness now turning to treacherous slabs of black ice. I wandered through the unlit streets, feeling my way by the walls, the fires of the refinery and the cold silver of the stars, until at length I stumbled on the town bar. It wasn’t advertised as such, and made no invitation to strangers, but it was that universal place that springs up in all towns where there is nothing to do–perhaps once it had been a private home which had simply forgotten to close its door to strangers, and was now transformed into a small warm den with a stove set in the centre of the room, where men could sit in silence, focused on the entirely serious business of drinking themselves blind on moonshine. My presence aroused the odd stare but no comment as I slipped down by the stove and offered the two-toothed woman in charge a few roubles for a glass of alcohol only a few steps above antifreeze and a bowl of rice and beans.

“I’m going to see my cousin,” I explained. “He’s dying. Do you know anyone who can take me to Pietrok-112?”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” mumbled the crone, and that, it seemed, was all that there was to say.